Thanks to more than a decade of ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) findings, the main headlines from the surveys are widely known.1 Even those who are not education experts or researchers can tell you that after five years of schooling, only half of all children in India can read at Grade 2 level. And that the results for basic arithmetic are even more worrying.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have recently come under attack for yet another reason: many (if not most) of the interventions that have been found successful in RCTs have not been adopted by governments, let alone taken to scale.